


The Spice of Life

by Kian



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Awesome Pepper Potts, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Extremis Pepper Potts, Families of Choice, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Minor Bucky Barnes/Steve Rogers, Multi, Pepper Potts and James "Bucky" Barnes Friendship, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Protective Bucky Barnes, Protective Pepper Potts, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-29
Updated: 2014-12-29
Packaged: 2018-03-04 03:48:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,239
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2908220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kian/pseuds/Kian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are a lot of things about her life which are legitimately terrifying, Pepper occasionally reflects.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Spice of Life

**Author's Note:**

> This idea of Pepper and Bucky becoming BFFs has been pleasantly haunting me since the summer, and while I've seen it cropping up in other peoples' stories (YAY!) in the time since I started on this fic, I couldn't find the right glue for my own story until recently. Namely, that Bucky and Pepper would understand what it is to feel like a danger to the people around them, and would value and speak to that struggle in one another. I'm not sure I hit this one out of the park, but I like where it ends up, so I'm letting it go out into the world before I nit-pick it to certain death.
> 
> As ever, this story is un-betaed, so please report all problems to the front desk. Enjoy!

There are a lot of things about her life which are legitimately terrifying, Pepper occasionally reflects.

The version of herself that had first taken the job of babysitting Tony Stark as the most beleaguered personal assistant to ever run another person’s life from stem to stern, a full time vocation she found herself comfortably sharing with a delightfully wry, disembodied intelligence; that person? She would have run away — not screaming, but perhaps breathing a little heavily and congratulating herself on her sense of self-preservation — at the very first indication that someday, this job would put her in the cross-hairs of the kinds of dangerous organizations interested in utterly ruining _people_ , not just portfolios. That she would see people she loved broken open, and sometimes at the hands of people she had liked and respected. That she herself would be kidnapped, tortured, and fundamentally altered. That she would one day live with soldiers and thieves and spies and uncontrollable forces of nature, keeping the number of a national icon and an accomplished assassin both on speed-dial. That her world would become so much larger and so much more dangerous than yo-yo-ing stock figures and making herself heard at board meetings and corporate espionage and the four-inch heels she wears to be able to look Tony’s business rivals square in the eye.

It’s a good thing, she thinks, that she never had the foggiest suspicion where her life would take her, because it _is_ terrifying, but she cannot fathom how she could ever walk away now, or what she could be doing with her life that would be half-so important to her as what she does everyday, both sitting at the top of Stark Industries, and sitting at the dinner table in the Tower in New York. This big terrifying life she’s got, for all its nightmares and losses and vulnerabilities, is full to the brim with hard-won respect and surprising friends and the kind of love that is so fierce and odd and sometimes painful that she never doubts that it exists and that it is entirely hers.

And, to be entirely honest, Pepper gets a little thrill about having Maria work her security at conferences, or letting Natasha paint her toenails (since she cannot paint her own unless she’s working a cover). She’s delighted to meet Agent May and practice her dialects over dinner and drinks while playing catch-up with Phil. She enjoys the feeling of keeping a weather eye on Steve and Thor’s public images with JARVIS’s help, as well as her private Skype dates with Jane and Bruce. She likes watching the bowl of M&Ms on the corner of her desk get low, smiles just a bit the whole day thinking about what kind or color combination Clint might like to pilfer next. (The time she had special ordered all purple shades for his birthday, the entire contents of the bowl had been gone as soon as she had stepped out to use the ladies’ room, with a sticky-note at the bottom of the bowl of a heart with an arrow through it left in their place.)

For a long time, their little family — hers and Tony’s; Happy, Rhodey, and JARVIS too — had been a bit lonely and sad, weighed down with a sort of inevitable expiration date on how long they could all hang onto each other when it seemed like inertia was working against them. Now, their family is enormous and wonderful and dangerous and kind, and while it could all still end any minute, it wouldn’t be because anybody let anyone else go.

And while she no longer wakes up terrified that she’s going to lose out on the people she loves and needs, she knows what that fear looks like in the mirror and so she recognizes it all too well in the face of someone else. 

* * *

There is absolutely no way she could ever have missed the pained presence of James Barnes after Steve brings him home one day with a defiant look in his eyes, just daring anyone to try and challenge him on it. And while Tony may mutter about how James is creepy and dangerous, and while Natasha may describe him — somewhat reverently, Pepper has noticed — as a ghost and as the assassin of assassins, and while the man himself may skulk carefully through the residential floors of the Tower in Steve’s protective shadow, Pepper can’t help but to see James. And caring about him comes as easy as breathing.

Getting James to _accept_ care is another thing entirely, of course.

She doesn’t miss how, in those first several months, James avoids her. He avoids everyone, really, but where he eyes the other Avengers with wariness and uncertainty, the look on James’ face when he spots Pepper or Jane or Darcy coming into the room is a mixture of terror and concern. He looks at Steve that way too, but also with a desperate affection that no one comments on (except for Tony, because Pepper can’t take Tony anywhere without a muzzle) for fear of driving James deeper into his head — it hadn’t taken any of them having a degree in the subject to understand that demonstrating emotion would have been dangerous for James while still in Hydra’s hands.

So she notices how James will want to leave the room when she enters it, how if he can’t — either because he can’t leave Steve or because he _needs_ to be in the room, be it the kitchen or the state-of-the-art gymnasium — he will find a way to be as far away as possible, always leaving her an open path to an exit and with as many of their dangerous friends between them as he can manage. She notices that James won’t get within his own arm’s reach, will let himself be rude — with wide, tortured eyes staring into space, nearly vibrating with the effort — if it keeps him away from her, unspeaking and tightly reined.

Steve occasionally tries to chide him about it, when James refuses to cross a room to take a file from her outstretched hand, refuses to acknowledge Pepper has spoken to him at all, but Pepper waves Steve off. Because James will break into her office, unseen, sometime in the night after such an incident, all the paperwork she’d brought for him neatly filled out and sorted, with an anonymous apology-gift on top, some little peculiar thing that years of familiarity with interpreting Tony’s awkward gestures gives her the perspective to appreciate. The first time it was an apple — a Roxbury Russet, like the tree her grandmother had had when she was growing up. The second time, it was a picture sheared out of a newspaper with unerringly precise margins, one of her and Tony together at a function a few weeks before, set carefully in a hand-cut mat. The third time, it was shoe polish that matched her nicest Louboutins. The fourth, a pair of silver quarters.

(She wondered whether he’d somehow heard her asking for change for the downstairs business office vending machine earlier that day or if he’d learned to ask JARVIS what she might need. She also wondered if he had any idea exactly how many sodas fifty cents from the 40’s could buy her. Enough to rot all her teeth right out of her head, definitely. She had them set in a small display case — which she kept on her desk right next to the perpetual motion toy Tony hates —  instead. They never failed to make her smile, even after the worst of conference calls.)

Because what it all boils down to is James _caring_. Everyone else he spends time around can handle themselves in a brawl, and even though Natasha and Maria are women just as much as she is, she knows there is an aspect to her own bearing that speaks to something old in James, something deeply ingrained and impossible to really shake loose. She knows because Steve calls her a respectful “ma’am” more often than “Pepper” or “Miss Potts,” holding doors open and helping her carry her portfolio bag when she lets him. Which means that, despite Steve and James being fully aware of her Extremis exposure and Steve being vocally and enthusiastically supportive of her hand-to-hand lessons with Rhodey and Natasha, there will always be the kind of respect there that defers and shields, instead of the kind of respect that ribs and roughhouses. Its sincerity keeps it from chafing at her sense of self, but James’ fear of hurting her is hurting _him_ , and that is a state of affairs that cannot be allowed to persist.

* * *

She starts small. Greeting him when she greets Steve, but pressing no further for conversation. Leaving him generic thank you notes in his favored corners of the common area for his little gifts and gestures. Behaving normally around him without intruding on his self-imposed boundaries, and letting him see her interact with the others when she gets comfortable in the evening, how she deliberately lets her guard down and is comfortable doing so.

When she starts to get a little nod when she greets James and Steve, she starts talking to him in the others’ company, including him in conversations yet not framing anything in such a way as would require his direct input or response. Just little inclusive references and gestures of acknowledgement, building up to tiny requests like, “can you tell Steve dinner’s ready?” or “have you seen my phone?”

It’s like the exact opposite of dealing with Tony, she thinks. Tony is an avalanche of words and gestures and stimulus, designed to weed out the sycophants and the squeamish and the spies right at the door. He’ll only slow down when he’s sure no one is trying to push him around or stab him in the back.

James, on the other hand, is so tightly reined in because he’s deathly afraid that _he_ might be the one who does the stabbing. He speaks in low tones, almost as though he is afraid to actually be heard, and only speaks at length when he’s sure he won’t be told what to do. While Tony is confrontational with every last fiber of his being, happiest when he’s taking the fight to the other person instead of waiting for it to eventually find him instead, James avoids and escapes and eludes a crisis, more terrified of _how_ he might prevail than _if_.

The month she had spent watching Tony try to pin James down to get a look at his arm probably shouldn’t have been as amusing as Pepper found it, but she had also enjoyed the perks of a keyed up Tony Stark, while James became intimately familiar with the layout of the entire Tower, its duct and emergency access systems, to the point that he no longer seemed to regard himself as a prisoner within its walls, so she figures everyone came away a winner from that episode.

She’s mostly content to take James’ improvement at a slow and steady pace; she’s not his therapist, just a willing friend. His recovery will go at his own speed regardless of what anyone else might think or want, and she’s not the one he needs at his elbow through all the ups and downs. Still, she dedicates a few minutes everyday to improving her extremely tentative friendship with James and with insuring that he will always have safe places in the world under the Stark Industries umbrella.

The media machine, on the other hand, is far less concerned with the process of effective trauma recovery. Half of the reporters who show up to Stark or Avengers press conferences are simply looking to string up the Winter Soldier no matter who he might really be under all the conditioning and human rights violations, while the other half are chomping at the bit to shove Captain America first into and then back out of the proverbial closet.

The latter line of questioning had been merely amusing before James had come to stay, but while James was still gradually learning he could exert complete control over the use of or reference to his own body — and was very decidedly without any sexual cravings for the time being — he was positively volatile about _any_ discussion of Steve’s sex life. James wasn’t able yet to articulate why the discussion of Steve having or not having sex bothered him so badly, but after three shattered coffee tables and a slew of broken china, small appliances, and demolished decorative pillows, it was mutually agreed upon that Steve’s relationship status was an off-limits topic in press conferences and that the best time for James to spar and run ops simulations down in the newly television-less gym with Natasha and Clint was during said press conferences anyway.

The problem with these measures is that they depended on two things: that the media would be entirely populated by ethical reporters who respected a topic ban that might cost their publishers untold potential sales, and that anyone anywhere could corral an assassin indefinitely, let alone two other assassins with busily murderous schedules who are not entirely convinced themselves that a little “acting out” isn’t the best medicine for their peer.

So while Tony might have been content to declare the situation resolved and well-handled, Pepper lives in the real world with the real people who populate it and knows when it’s time to put a series of contingency plans into place. Just in case, she assures Tony, because _of course_ she in no way doubts his ability to handle something as simple as the variant motivations of literally thousands of individual people and their respective bosses.

She doesn’t even bother addressing Tony’s confidence that redirecting James’ attentions for a handful of hours a week means that they will be diverted indefinitely; human nature has never been Tony’s forte and she has ceased expecting significant improvement in this area. She certainly doesn’t compare Tony’s inability to leave anything alone with James’, because the object of James’ fascination holds no similar degree of fascination for Tony and therefore cannot conceivably be of so much interest to anyone else.

Instead she smiles, nods, kisses Tony on the cheek, encourages him to be distracted by something shiny in his workshop, and then sets about planning for the eventual failure of a system that doesn’t follow a prescribed pattern of ones and zeroes.

* * *

However, the moment of truth arrives not when the camera is pointed at James, but when it is pointed squarely at Pepper herself.

Stark Industries had been fairly successful as a whole in keeping a lid on the kidnapping and effective torture of its CEO at the hands of one Aldrich Killian. This was made much easier by pointing the attention towards Tony and Iron Man, the takedown of the toothless Mandarin and the arrest of the Vice President of the United States for treason. By keeping the spotlight of a ravenous public pointed firmly away from the unpleasant adventures of one Virginia Potts, her own involvement in the episode was all but entirely forgotten by the time Steve Rogers had dropped three helicarriers in the Potomac and the rest of the world found it had other scandals to worry about. By the time James had come to live in the Tower under the mighty financial cloak of Stark Industries, Pepper’s encounter with Extremis had passed entirely out of public memory.

But while the rest of the world may have forgotten, Pepper herself could not.

She had seen three separate therapists to work through the nightmares, the panic attacks, the hyper awareness, the paranoia, and all the symptoms of post-traumatic stress and victimization of assault. And that didn’t even take into account the flare-ups which, while stress-related, could be as unpredictable as Tony’s attention on a good day.

It is just following a normal Board of Directors’ meeting, on a normal Wednesday, in the middle of a normal week, in the middle of a blessedly normal September, that they’re humoring the few members of the business press who’d bothered to turn up by seeing off a retiring Board member as part of a photo op at the curb in front of the Tower. The crotchety old geezer who Pepper is in no way sad to see go has just pulled away in his obligatory limo when a man rushes Pepper and Happy out of the lingering crowd on the sidewalk.

She barely sees the knife, the whites of the man’s wild eyes, before Happy bodily throws her to the ground with a yell. There are the sounds of a scuffle, before Happy grunts in pain and falls to the side.

The man’s knife has blood on it when Pepper rolls over to where she can see him and he’s rounding Happy’s fallen, groaning form, headed straight for her.

Time slows. Cameras start flashing, blinding her, and there is shouting seemingly all around, but not so loud or near that it drowns out the attacking mad man.

“Starks are traitors and thieves! They’ve sold us out to the enemy all along! They have to be stopped!”

It’s nothing she hasn’t heard or read before, a million times. But as the wiry man — drawn and desperate-looking, haggard with the signs of poor hygiene and worse habits — bears down on her, the terror of this irrational hatred becomes a new, horrible thing that she feels helpless in the face of.

Just as he is almost on top of Pepper — knife raised and ready to strike down at her prone form, frozen as it is in shock — the yelling breaks off into a high pitiful cry and the man’s face screws up into a mask of pain and surprise. The knife drops with a clang to the concrete just a foot away from Pepper and a series of crunching sounds follows in quick succession. Finally, her attacker lets out a thready scream as he collapses to the sidewalk.

James is standing behind him, staring down at him where he shivers and wails and convulses on the ground, a solid, shadowed presence of menace; long hair obscuring the features of his face, with his feet braced wide and his weight balanced, while his hands are in matching fists at his sides.

Security pours out of the building in the next moment as the crowd of startled New Yorkers and members of the once sleepy press corps react in mutual confused alarm and morbid delight. The SI officers swarm Happy and the attacker, and form a tight ring of protection around her, but it is James himself who lowers to a knee on the sidewalk, looking up at her from behind his fall of hair, and slowly reaches to take her hand — she abruptly feels the rawness of her scraped palms and elbows and knees from where she collided with the concrete, and the bruises forming along her hips and shoulder — into his own.

Her _glowing_ hand.

He cradles her palm between his own, and she watches as the unnatural heat of her skin heats the metal of his left hand and rapidly burns the flesh of his right. His grip remains light and gentle, and he seems not to even notice his own discomfort as he meets her gaze.

“Are you all right, Miss Potts?” James asks, his voice rough with disuse and softly pitched.

“I —” she starts. “I don’t know.”

“Okay.”

Beside her, the security team have bustled a loudly complaining Happy into an unmarked car on his way to the hospital and handcuffed and removed the attacker to a more secure and less-public location.

She can hear the fabric of her clothes searing, and her nose protests at the smell of the burnt fibers.

“Can you move?” James asks, still entirely unconcerned about the fact that Pepper is lighting up like a Roman candle.

“I think so,” Pepper says, trying to borrow his calm.

James takes her other hand into his, her skin nearly incandescent as the Extremis in her veins activates. She feels like she’s burning up, and fear chokes her at the thought that this might be the time, the time when the Extremis becomes unstable and oh god, there are people all around, and she’s going to kill them all and....

“ _Pepper_ ,” James says, and there’s a sternness in his voice that she can’t ignore. He looks straight into her eyes and holds her there, transfixed in the ocean of his steely calm.

“We’re going to stand up,” he says, “and we’re going to go inside. JARVIS will take us upstairs to the pool, and then we’re going to go for a swim. How does that sound?”

It takes her a moment before she can nod, not trusting her voice around the tight lock of terror in her throat.

“Good. On three, then.”

He counts it off, and on three he pulls her up onto her feet. She wobbles precariously, her left foot still encased in the four-inch heels she wears to tower over the Board. James transfers her hands to his shoulders and kneels down to lift her foot and remove the shoe, chucking it aside carelessly as he stands and takes her hand again.

Like a pair of children, he leads her back into the Tower by the hand, talking under his breath and only to her about the swim they’re going to take and how nice the pool will feel. The security team Maria had whipped into shape as soon as she’d come on board clears a path for them through the entrance and to the elevator, seamlessly efficient. In the back of her mind, Pepper thinks — somewhat hysterically — that she really needs to give all of them a raise and send Maria a gift basket. Maybe a nice assortment of non-lethal weaponry, Stark Industries’ latest, arranged tastefully in wicker and crinkle cut paper filler, topped with a cheerful bow. She sobs out a laugh as she thinks of what it would look like sitting on Maria’s desk.

James smiles back at her, somewhat crookedly, breaking the flow of his mumbled words briefly. He gestures her into the elevator before him, then steps in behind, setting his back squarely to the closing doors of the elevator, an effective shield against prying eyes and further attack both.

“I know, Steve _does_ look ridiculous in shorts. It’s those knobby knees. All the science and medicine the world can offer, and he still has the knobbiest knees in New York.”

Pepper really does laugh a little then, soft and short, but real.

JARVIS makes that strangely delicate not-noise he does in the place where a person might clear their throat.

“Miss Potts, I understand you would like to take a swim in the pool this afternoon. I have taken the liberty of adjusting your schedule and having your bathing suit delivered to the changing room.”

“Thank you, JARVIS,” she says softly.

“Not at all, Miss Potts,” JARVIS replies, and there is a faint trace of what anyone might describe as relief in his tone. “Is there anything else I can do to be of service?”

Pepper is at a loss, but James interjects for her. “Can you call Stark? Tell him to clear the decks for a while. We need a little space for the moment.”

Pepper notices her feet, while dimming slightly, are still singing the carpet of the elevator.

“Yes, of course, Sergeant Barnes.”

“Swimming?” Pepper asks, looking up at James and trying to ignore how volatile she feels.

He grins at her, a little boyish thing, before he shrugs his left shoulder and looks away briefly. “Now’s as good a time as any.”

The elevator opens at the Avengers’ recreational level and they step out. James draws her toward the entrance to the Olympic-sized swimming pool, by-passing the changing rooms and gym. He stops her, however, at the entrance to the target range, considering, before leading Pepper inside.

The target range is — of course — more than just a series of lanes with paper targets. Tony had designed the range to be interactive, with standing dummies and moveable platforms to create scenarios and specific settings. There’s even a sort of weather simulator in place where a user can fiddle with the environmental conditions for the room in case a sudden desire to test weapons and techniques in various extremes is desired. The “range” technically takes up three vertical floors and half of the horizontal space of the Tower’s width. They have been known to lose Natasha and Clint to the range for hours and even days at a time.

James draws her in and toward a series of standing dummies and platforms set up in the vague approximation of a city block. When she’s a few feet from the first dummy, he drops her hand and steps back.

“Stop him,” he says.

“What?”

“The man from the street. He’s here. You have to stop him.”

It takes her a moment and a burst of panicked adrenaline to realize that her attacker is not _actually_ returned, but is instead embodied in the dummy in front of her. She stares, feeling overwhelmed and exposed and afraid. The sizzle of Extremis burns brighter.

James circles to the other side of the dummy and looks at her over its shoulder.

“Here. Touch him. He’s just as breakable as you are. No more powerful than you. Stop him.”

“I can’t,” Pepper whispers, her brilliant fingers outstretched to the dummy, but falling short. “I could hurt him.”

“You will,” James concedes. “But you won’t hurt me. Or them,” he gestures to the other dummies further away, “or anyone else. Just the one who tried to hurt you first.”

“It’s not safe. I could —”

“Nothing is safe,” James says, his voice back to that stern place, unshaking and firm. “Nothing outside of you is ever safe. But _you_ can be safe. You can do that. It’s a choice. Stop him, and you can be safe.”

Pepper hesitates, and James waits.

Slowly, she lets herself see the face of her attacker in the blankness of the dummy’s head, lets herself hear his voice and see the flash of the raised knife. She doesn’t know she has hit the dummy until it is gone, a smoldering heap on the ground between her and James, her own hoarse voice echoing in her ears.

She breathes, harsh pants that slow and steady the longer she looks at the dummy, dead and done and never in a place to hurt her again. She’s not given to violence — hates it, in point of fact — but the sight of the subdued “attacker” slows her heart and lets the fear uncoil and slither away.

Pepper’s not sure how much time has passed when James steps over the dummy and lays his right hand on her shoulder, cool skin pressed to cool skin.

“You’re safe now,” he says. “You can control it. You are in control. You’re safe, and _we’re_ safe. No need to be afraid anymore.”

“Oh my god,” she moans quietly, and James pulls her gently into a hug.

“You’re not going to hurt anyone,” he soothes as she fights the urge to sob. “You’re safe now. I’ll help you and you’ll be safe.”

Pepper swallows and says, “Okay.”

When they finally make their way into the pool room, they find Steve and Natasha swimming competing laps, Tony practicing horrible dives from the diving board, Bruce tucked far away from the pool’s edge (and Tony) with a book, and Maria leaning against one wall, somehow just as intimidating in a functional one-piece as in her most intimidating of suits.

Pepper shivers, thinking that they will all be on top of her with their attention, but Natasha just waves a friendly hello from the far end of the pool, while Steve calls out to James to “come in, the water’s fine,” which earns him a snort and a wave in return. Maria nods, before turning her eyes back to the pool, like a lifeguard on duty, and Tony…

Tony yells out a “Pepper, watch this!” and then belly flops into the pool like a teenager, nearly on top of Natasha and Steve. In the resulting madness of the moment — a moment she’s not altogether sure Tony will end up surviving — Pepper finds herself rounding the edge of the pool to corral Tony like always, and is promptly pulled into the water by her idiot boyfriend. When her head breaks water again, she is entirely lost to the moment and to Tony and to being Pepper Potts again.

She doesn’t notice that James has disappeared until Steve leaves to find him.

* * *

She doesn’t sleep well that night and, after Tony falls into a dead sleep, she finds herself walking the common areas of the Avengers’ level, lit only by the glow of the city beyond the windows.

He doesn’t startle her when she notices him at her elbow, looking out at Manhattan below, but she has no idea when he arrived to join her.

James drifts away again a few moments after she notices him, and she can hear him shifting things around in the kitchen area. After another few minutes, she follows him and finds James leaning over the stove top, watching something intently in the middle of a frying pan.

When Pepper stretches up onto her tip toes, leaning over the bar-height top of the opposite counter, it looks like bread.

After a few minutes of dedicated study and soft sizzling noises, James flips the slice of bread with his metal fingers, pushing it around the buttered pan before grabbing a plate beside the stove — already covered in one prepared slice — and tipping the contents of the pan onto it before turning off the hob and setting the pan aside to cool. He places the plate on the bar-top, in front of her, and then crosses to the fridge and pulls out the almond milk Pepper keeps there, pouring her a half glass and setting that beside the plate.

“Cinnamon toast,” James says quietly. “Steve always liked it when he couldn’t sleep.”

“Thank you.” Pepper picks up the plate, and holds it out to James. “I prefer company when I eat.”

James hesitates, then removes the top slice of toast, holding the bread gingerly between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. Pepper picks up her own slice and, watching each other, they each take a bite of their midnight snacks. As the caramelized cinnamon and sugar on the buttered toast settles pleasantly across her tongue, she smiles at James widely and reaches out her hand for his free, metal one.

His eyes widen, then focus on the palm of her extended hand. He swallows and stares for a long moment, and Pepper takes another bite while James considers bolting.

Finally, as skittish as a colt, James lays his metal hand into her own smaller, flesh one. Pepper smiles again around the bite of toast in her mouth and gives his hand a squeeze.

“You’re safe,” she says after a while. “We’re safe, here. Both of us. We’re safe here, with our friends.”

They’ve long since finished their snacks when James replies softly, “Yes.” 

* * *

There are a lot of things about her life which are legitimately terrifying, Pepper occasionally reflects.

But neither she nor her found-family are one of them. 

* * *

end

 

 


End file.
